1964 All Blacks vs France. Chris
Laidlaw remains best known to most New Zealanders as one of the
great All Black halfbacks of the 1960s. (Chris Laidlaw collection)

When Chris Laidlaw applied for a Rhodes
scholarship he was already famous. An All Black at 19, he was widely
regarded as one of the most brilliant halfbacks New Zealand had ever
produced.

Laidlaw refused to become one of
the Englishmen that Cecil Rhodes imagined his colonial scholars would
turn into under Oxford’s influence. The more he saw of English
life at Oxford, the more he knew he ‘wanted to be something
else’.

‘Janet Frame was right when she wrote of the impulse
of those who travel from New Zealand as “examining not
the place of arrival, but the place of departure”’,
he wrote. Laidlaw’s experiences at Oxford gave him a
new appreciation of his homeland: ‘it gave me a better
sense of what I was capable of and a fuller understanding of
the way other societies pigeon-hole their citizens. I grew to
better understand how lucky NZ society was in having consciously
set its mind against that’.

Graduating with an MLitt, Laidlaw
joined the New Zealand Department of Foreign Affairs, serving in Fiji,
France and Britain. He was then seconded to the Commonwealth Secretariat
as Executive Assistant to the Secretary General. In that time Zimbabwe
gained independence and the infamous career of Idi Amin in Uganda
ended. Working with the Secretary General, Laidlaw was also caught
up in the politics of Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea, Namibia and the
Caribbean. In 1986 his specialised experience led to his posting to
Zimbabwe as the first New Zealand High Commissioner in Africa.

In 1989 he returned to New Zealand
to take up the post of Race Relations Conciliator and Human Rights
Commissioner.

Laidlaw is now based in Wellington
where he is a Regional Councillor. He is well-known for his Sunday
morning radio programme.

‘I quickly realised that although I was adopting
many of the manners of the English, I wanted to be something
else.’

Further Reading

Chris Laidlaw, Mud in your eye: a worm’s eye view of the changing
world of rugby, Wellington: Reed, 1973.